Oh No, Joe, Say It Isn't So
by John Lawrence
Despite prior commitments to Joe Biden and House Democrats, Joe Mancin is a "No" on Biden's Build Back Better bill which will provide child care, eldercare, universal Pre-K and more. Dr. No made his position clear yesterday. He's tired of farting around aka negotiating. Democrats need all 50 votes in the Senate to pass the bill. 49 are on board and this gives Mancin extraordinary power. It's his way or the highway. Mancin has said he would support a bill totaling $1.5 trillion, but the house and Senate Democrats have been gingerly "negotiating" with Joe for more. Here's an idea: take what you can get and go home. Cuz you ain't gonna get no mo. Let Mancin write the bill. Throw in voting rights as well, and pass both in the same bill by reconciliation. Mancin has already essentially written a voting rights bill he would support. Again it's not everything progressives want, but it's better than nuttin.
Conservatives have traditionally broken inflation on the backs of the poor. The Phillips curve which is gospel among conservative economists says that you need to increase unemployment in order to rein in inflation. Problem is at this time there is hardly any unemployment. So what else can you do to keep poor people poor? Don't give them any more government benefits. That's the ticket. Of course, progressives say the Phillips curve is hogwash. All you need to do is to extract money from the economy by taxing the rich. But tell that to rich corporation who are spending billions on lobbyists to convince quasi conservative Democrats like Joe Mancin otherwise. And then there is conservative activist Paul Weyrich who famously said, "“I don’t want everybody to vote . . . our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Translate that into economic terms and you get, "I don't want everyone to be middle class. Who would do the necessary back breaking labor to keep the economy growing if not for the poor."
So conservatives don't want the poor to vote and they also don't want them to work their way into the middle class. They want to keep the poor poor so the economy has a goodly supply of backbreaking and menial labor which it badly needs, especially if you want to buy American. Otherwise, we would have to export the backbreaking labor to other countries where there is a plentiful supply of poor people. Right now conservatives are aghast at how the shortage of labor is fueling demands for higher wages. This is a blow to their very way of life which is predicated on keeping the poor poor. They don't want to be flooded with immigrants to take the menial labor jobs so those who came in 20 years ago can progress to the middle class like Joe Biden wants them to do. The best way to keep them poor is to not give them any more government benefits.
So progressive Democrats in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate have been screwed once again. The whole deal was that both the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better bill were supposed to pass in tandem. Then after farting around (excuse me, "negotiating") for months and months, finally Joe Mancin has put the kibosh on Build Back Better after successfully delinking the two. Screwed again. Lucy with the football. So here's the solution. Stop negotiating. Let Mancin write the bill and then everybody genuflect. And while you're at it, throw Mancin's voting rights, bill written by him, into the package and pass the whole ungodly stew by reconciliation and be done with it.
